A Brief History of Fascist Lies Federico Finchelstein UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS A Brief History of Fascist Lies A Brief History of Fascist Lies Federico Finchelstein UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press Oakland, California © 2020 by Federico Finchelstein Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Finchelstein, Federico, 1975– author. Title: A brief history of fascist lies / Federico Finchelstein. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019052243 (print) | LCCN 2019052244 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520346710 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520975835 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Fascism—History—20th century. Classification: LCC JC481 .F5177 2020 (print) | LCC JC481 (ebook) | DDC 320.53/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052243 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052244 Manufactured in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Lucia, Gabi, y Laura Contents Introduction 1 1. On Fascist Lies 11 2. Truth and Mythology in the History of Fascism 20 3. Fascism Incarnate 28 4. Enemies of the Truth? 33 5. Truth and Power 40 6. Revelations 49 7. The Fascist Unconscious 58 8. Fascism against Psychoanalysis 65 9. Democracy and Dictatorship 75 10. The Forces of Destruction 85 Epilogue: The Populist War against History 91 Acknowledgments 107 Notes 109 Index 135 Introduction What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening. DONALD J. TRUMP, 2018 Since then, a struggle between the truth and the lie has been taking place. As always, this struggle will end victoriously for the truth. ADOLF HITLER, 1941 You must believe me because I have the habit—it is the system of my life—of always and everywhere saying the truth. BENITO MUSSOLINI, 1924 One of the key lessons of the history of fascism is that racist lies led to extreme political violence. Today lies are back in power. This is now more than ever a key lesson of the history of fascism. If we want to understand our troublesome present, we need to pay attention to the history of fascist ideologues and to how and why their rhetoric led to the Holocaust, war, and destruction. We need history to remind us how so much violence and racism happened in such a short period. How did the Nazis and other fascists come to power and murder millions of people? They did so by spreading ideological [ 1 ] lies. Fascist political power was significantly derived from the co- optation of truth and the widespread promulgation of lies. Today we’re seeing an emergent wave of new right-wing populist leaders throughout the world. And much like fascist leaders of the past, a great deal of their political power is derived from questioning reality; endorsing myth, rage, and paranoia; and promoting lies. In this book, I offer a historical analysis of fascists’ use of politi- cal lies and their understanding of the truth. This has become a highly relevant question in the present moment, an era that is sometimes described as post-fascist and sometimes as post-truth. The book presents a historical framework for thinking through the history of lying in fascist politics in order to help us think through the use of political lies in the present. Lying is, of course, as old as politics. Propaganda, hypocrisy, and mendacity are ubiquitous in the history of political power struggles. Hiding the truth in the name of a greater good is a hall- mark of most, if not all, histories of politics. Liberals and commu- nists and monarchs, democrats, and tyrants have also lied repeatedly. To be sure, fascists were not the only ones lying in their time, nor are their descendants the only ones lying in ours. Indeed, the German Jewish philosopher Max Horkheimer once observed that the submission of truth to power is at the heart of modernity.1 But the same argument can be made for ancient times. In more recent history, studying fascist liars should not mean letting liberals, conservatives, and communists off the hook. Indeed, lies and an elastic understanding of the truth are a hallmark of many political movements.2 But the point I want to make clear in this book is that fascist and now populist liars play in a league of their own. [ 2 ] INTRODUCTION Fascist lying in politics is not typical at all. This difference is not a matter of degree, even if the degree is significant. Lying is a fea- ture of fascism in a way that is not true of those other political tra- ditions. Lying is incidental to, say, liberalism, in a way that it is not to fascism. And, in fact, when it comes to fascist deceptions, they share few things with others forms of politics in history. They are situated beyond the more traditional forms of political duplicity. Fascists consider their lies to be at the service of simple absolute truths, which are in fact bigger lies. Thus, their lying in politics war- rants a history of its own. · · · This book addresses the fascist position on truth, which lays the foundations of what became a fascist history of lies. This history still resonates in our present time whenever fascist terrorists, from Oslo to Pittsburgh and from Christchurch to Poway, decide after turning lies into reality to act on them with lethal violence. At the time I finished this book, a fascist massacred twenty peo- ple at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in the worst anti-Hispanic attack in the history of the United States. This fascist terrorist invoked a “truth” that has nothing to do with actual history or with reality. In fact, he invoked “the inconvenient truth” in the title of his short manifesto. The killer maintained that his attack was a preemptive action against Hispanic invaders and that “they are the instigators, not me.” He was especially concerned about the American-born children of Hispanic immigrants, whom he clearly did not consider real Americans. In doing so, he promoted a vile and racist metric that he, and others, believe should be the standard for determining INTRODUCTION [ 3 ] American citizenship or legal status. This metric is based on things that never happened: immigrants do not cross the US border with the intention to conquer or contaminate. But this is not what the racist ideology of white supremacy alleges. Fascist racism itself is based on the lie that humans are hierar- chically divided into master races and inferior races. It is based on the purely paranoiac fantasy that the weaker races aim to dominate the superior ones and that this is why the white races need to preemptively defend themselves. These lies led the killer to kill. There was nothing new in the terrorist’s conflation of lies and death or his projection of his racist and totalitarian views onto the inten- tions of his victims. Fascists had killed many times before in the name of lies masquerading as truths. But in contrast to previous histories of fascism, this time fascists share common goals with populists in power. In other words, their racist views are shared with the leadership at the White House. Fascism acts from below, but it is legitimized from above. When the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro openly denigrates Afro-Brazilians or when the American president Donald J. Trump talks about Mexicans as rapists or an “invasion” arriving in “cara- vans,” they legitimate fascist thinking in some of their political fol- lowers. Racist lies, in turn, proliferate in public discourse. As the New York Times explained following the El Paso shooting, “At cam- paign rallies before last year’s midterm elections, President Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. ‘You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!’ he declared at one rally. ‘That is an invasion!’ Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announc- [ 4 ] INTRODUCTION ing that ‘this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.’ ”3 The same lies that motivated the El Paso killer are at the center of Trumpism and the so-called effort to Make America Great Again. Lying about things that are part of the permanent record has become part of the American president’s daily routine. Trump continuously has used specific propaganda techniques, lying with- out consequence, replacing rational debate with paranoia and resentment, and casting reality itself into doubt.4 Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media and the extensive documented instances where he claims he didn’t say something that is in fact in the public record are related to the history of fascist lies analyzed in this book. Further, the Trump agenda transforms ideological premises, often based in paranoia and fictions about those who are different or feel or behave differently, into actual politics that include adopt- ing racist measures specifically targeting Muslims and Latino immigrants, as well as denigrating black communities, neighbor- hoods, journalists, and politicians. At the same time, he has defended white nationalist protesters who attended the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counterprotester was murdered.5 As Ishaan Tharoor explained in the Washington Post, “He has stoked white-nationalist grievances among his base while demonizing, belittling or attacking immigrants and minorities. Just in recent weeks, the president launched tirades against minor- ity congresswomen and spoke of the nation’s inner cities as zones of ‘infestation.’ Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections and now, as his reelection campaign gets into full swing, he stirred fear and anger about an ‘invasion’ of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, warning of an existential peril marching into the country.”6 INTRODUCTION [ 5 ] How is it possible for the White House to promote and provoke acts by fascist terrorists? As I explained in my previous book, From Fascism to Populism in History, we are witnessing a new chapter in the history of fascism and populism, two different political ideolo- gies that now share an objective: to foment xenophobia without preventing political violence.